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Preston woke to the sound of movement.
Actually, there were dozens of sounds around him. All unfamiliar, alien, and he slept lightly, sometimes coming to consciousness and listening to the whispers of water and computer fans. In these moments of not-quite-sleep, he seemed to forget everything that had happened since he drove through the chaos that was Libria this last days since the Rebellion, to the flat in the third zone, once to the offenders’ secret place, and now to this. He seemed to forget everything that happened after he entered the room, with its bright colors and smells and textures, with its own chaos, very different from the madness outside - a chaos holding a harmony inside.
And then he remembered how he had touched a single thing, a strange, hypnotizing thing, five balls on strings in a row - and it all changed to another sort of chaos completely. The chaos of a different world, different people, different feelings. Torchwood.
He was now in the heart of it, enveloped by its smells: damp and earthy and metallic, by its sounds: ticking and beeping and water whispering. But the sound that woke him up was different from what counted as silence in this place; it was human. Steps on the cement and grate, heels firm and loud. Keys clicking under the sure fingers. Soft words, said in a sing-song voice.
He opened his eyes, sneaking a glance over his hand. There was a woman, walking around the Hub, clicking on the keyboards, switching things on. She moved as if she belonged here. He stirred, and she turned to him with an easy smile.
'Mornin' sweetheart... oh!' She froze, and then edged closer, her fingers twitching and the hand tense in a ready-for-a-gun way. 'You’re not Ianto!'
'No, I'm not.' He sat up slowly, blinking residual sleepiness away.
'Ianto is still asleep,' Jack said, coming out of his office. 'Morning, Gwen. Let me introduce you: John Preston, our sudden guest - Gwen Cooper, our... what's your position, again?'
Gwen huffed at him.
'PC Liaison and second-in-command. So.' She gave Preston a once-over. 'I go away for one bloody weekend and you get yourself a tall, dark and handsome? Where did you get him, by the way - from the freezer?'
Preston stood up.
'Not exactly. Though, I hope to return to my freezer as soon as it only possible and not to bother anyone around.'
'Not a morning person, are you?' Jack asked Preston cheerfully. 'Though you look good even with bed hair.'
'Now I'm not blaming you for not calling me here earlier,' Gwen inserted. 'I would've wanted to keep such a man all to myself too!'
‘I can share,’ Jack winked to her. She looked thoughtful. Jack clapped his hands and went into business mode. ‘The lorry?’
‘Will be at the place. I came to take you there, and to get some of Ianto’s coffee for Rhys.’ Gwen looked around, suddenly realizing what was missing. ‘Where’s Ianto? He okay? Why was it you who called Rhys, not him?’ There was a shade of fear in her big eyes, growing every second, as if she just realized that there could be something terrible happening.
‘He’s fine, but Rhys will have to manage with Starbucks,’ Jack said. ‘Ianto’s asleep, and he won’t be coming with us. Preston, get ready, we’re going in five. Gwen, I’ll explain to you on the way, we need corpse bags and other stuff… a lot,’ he added gravely.
They drank coffee, not as tasty as Ianto’s but still rather nice, from cartons on their way to the Cybermen factory. Gwen also had a sandwich, which she promptly threw up as soon as they entered the hangar. It had cooled down overnight, but still smelled of scorched flesh and spilled blood, with a new, sickly sweet undertone of decay.
People had burned here. Cybermen, Jack called them; people with their feelings cut away in exchange for cruel metal in their bodies. Last night, it felt surreal, a hallucination from going off the dose, from the shock of being thrown into a different world; today, with the corpses dead and still in their steel frames, the reality of it hit Preston like a wall.
It took them most of the day to collect all the corpses and load them into the lorry, and then to dismantle the units and load them in, too. The bodies were heavy with metal and death. Jack didn’t let Rhys inside until every body part was packed into black plastic bags, and the units hosed down with water to take most of the blood away.
Dragging a bag to the lorry, Preston asked Jack:
‘So, there are only three of you in Torchwood, or is it just weekend duty?’ (There were no weekends in Libria, but he understood it from the conversations between others that here, it was a ritual period of spare time and rest.)
‘No, you’ve seen us all,’ Jack huffed, pulling the bag up into the lorry.
‘How often do situations like this happen?’
‘If you want me to estimate the average… this scope - once in a month, I suppose.’
‘And lesser scope is?..’
‘Deadly threat to the world or to the city, but not as much of a mess. Some threats have the decency to clean up after themselves.’
‘They happen…’
‘Once a week.’
‘And you said to the Doctor that you were doing fine with only three people on staff.’
‘Yes.’
Preston looked at him incredulously.
‘How come this city is still standing?’
Jack laughed.
‘The Welsh. They are lucky bastards.’
‘You aren’t Welsh,’ Rhys commented on his way.
‘No, but Welsh rubbed off on me,’ Jack said with an obscene smirk.
Rhys rolled his eyes. Preston made a note to learn to do it; it seemed that eye-rolling was an important form of non-verbal communication among these people, along with different movements of eyebrows, winking and a diverse range of smiles and grins.
Back at the Hub, Rhys offered his help with unloading the lorry and before Jack even opened his mouth to argue, he was struck by the indisputable argument:
‘To hell with all your secrecy, you still need an extra pair of hands; later I can tell anyone that I was carrying Big Top Secret Boxes with something clinking inside, boo-hoo! And yes, I was promised Ianto’s Coffee!’
Whether it was the whole speech or just the last part, Jack smirked and nodded in agreement. After all, it was Ianto’s coffee.
Ianto himself looked as if the night before had never happened, prim and proper in a black suit and pristine white shirt, neither of which were actually suited for the hard and dirty work of unloading the lorry. Nevertheless, he worked as much as others, never even blinking at the bodybags or the clutter of metal in the boxes.
‘How many?’ Jack asked him.
‘Not many. I suppose Lumic used homeless people. We’ll have to check fingerprints. Of course…’
‘We won’t keep the bodies,’ Jack interrupted. ‘There are enough of them in the morgue, and those are too… disfigured to be useful. Incinerate them all. And the units have to be destroyed entirely, too.’
Ianto simply nodded. Gwen turned a little green at the exchange.
Preston unloaded the last box and straightened, stretching his shoulders. His body hurt all over. It wasn’t the usual fatigue he felt after the training (which required sharp movements and a quick change between relaxing and straining muscles), it was different - the pain feeling close to cramps. He rolled his head experimentally, trying to release at least some of the tension from his neck and shoulders.
Jack moved behind his back, and Preston automatically turned to him. Jack raised his hands in a gesture of peace.
‘Soldier instincts,’ he remarked with a grin. ‘It’s a long time since there were soldiers in Tochwood. Got used to the civilians.’
So they were civilians and still had to deal with incidents like the one the last night. Illogical. Dangerous. Simply mad.
Preston rolled one shoulder again and cringed slightly; it still felt wrong, not quite displaced, but uncomfortably tugging.
‘Let me,’ Jack said taking him by his shoulders and turning him around.
Jack’s palms felt heavy on his shoulders, running to the sides and then back. In the cool damp air, their warmth sent shivers down his back, a not entirely unpleasant sensation. Big hands wrapped around his neck, and he suddenly felt vulnerable without the protection of his high collar. Then strong fingers started working on the strained muscles, squeezing the tension out. Preston sighed, and a soft sound escaped his lips along with the air.
‘Myfanwy must be hungry,’ Ianto called out from the stairs.
‘Go on. We’ll be up there in a minute,’ Jack replied. Preston closed his eyes, let his muscles relax into the touch. It was a rare pleasure, a pleasure the offenders learned tentatively, and he had only just been discovering, holding his kids back home: the pleasure of being touched by another human being.
‘That’s it,’ Jack said after a minute or so. ‘At least for now.’
Entering the main hall, Preston stopped, surprised by a bizarre scene: Ianto, wearing a plastic apron and elbow-length rubber gloves, was arranging large pieces of raw meat on the grill in front of the pool. It looked like the whole animal, stripped from skin and cut into parts. Ianto seemed a bit nauseous under the mask of calm professionalism. Jack stood beside Preston, and he noticed that Jack was watching Ianto closely, while faking nonchalance for the others.
'Ianto! I could do that', Gwen exclaimed coming from the autopsy room. She must have noticed his pallor, too. Doing things with meat was probably not the best idea after yesterday’s massacre.
'You don't know how she likes it,' Ianto replied putting the last piece into place. Straightening up, he gave his arrangement a final glance to check if everything was done right.
'God, he has to make even a bird-lizard feeding into a royal reception, doesn’t he?' Rhys murmured looking away from the bloody chunks.
Ianto took a large bottle and strayed something reddish onto the meat and moved away, behind the pillar. Then he whistled gently.
With a predator's cry, something large fell down from the high Hub's ceiling. A rush of air brought Preston a smell of animal and leather and dung. The creature that reeked of it gorged on the meat: grabbed the pieces which looked small in its... beak? jaw? - threw them up into the air, and then caught to swallow. It looked like one of the extinct species they studied during biology course at school. A pterodactyl.
He glanced at the others. Jack moved aside to one of the monitors, checking the readings; Gwen, back at her table, listed through some papers. Ianto turned away from the feast, holding something square and dark-brown. Rhys was the only one watching the creature, but though he looked wary, he wasn’t put out because of it; it seemed that everyone considered this… animal quite normal.
Even if this world was Libria’s past, pterodactyls became extinct long before humanity developed this sort of technology, right? Preston was quite sure of it. Until now. Or this world was something different? Some other universe - and oh, when did he actually started thinking about the worlds and universes in plurals? When just a week ago his thoughts were only about Libria, his country, and rarely about the neighbours…
The last piece of meat was swallowed. The pterodactyl clucked her beak a couple of times, cocked its head to the side and cooed. Ianto smiled and threw her the square he was holding. The pterodactyl caught it and took off with a triumphant cry, making a circle around the pillar before disappearing up under the ceiling.
'Won't she get cavities?' Rhys asked wryly.
‘It’s only one bar. She loves chocolate’, Ianto remarked, cleaning the remains of the meat from the grate.
‘And it’s good for her serotonin levels,’ sing-songed Gwen as if imitating someone else. Judging from the looks Ianto and Jack both threw her - one stern, the other amused - it was Ianto.
During the last twenty-four hours, Preston had been weighting the possible explanations of how all of this could be happening to him. The first time it could be a hallucination, an illusion of the overgrown secret room, produced by his overtired brain. The second time it felt like a dream. A weird and very bad dream. The third time he woke up in this twisted world. Again. With a woman in command. Preceded by time-travelers, cyber whatsits and alcohol. And now, a pterodactyl and people caring about its serotonin levels.
Really makes one wonder where the limits lie. If there are any limits.
He heard about people going mad when taken off the dose. Maybe it happened to him. Maybe everything that happened to him since he entered that hidden room was an withdrawal-induced hallucination.
Or maybe the hallucination started earlier, when he missed his first dose. And nothing had ever really happened. No resistance, no Hall of Mirrors, no rebellion. No Mary's soft touch, her final gift to him. And he will probably wake to find himself in a cell, reported by his own son or something.
He felt lightheaded, and the floor was suspiciously unstable under his feet. Hallucination or not, falling down in front of his imaginary or real sort-of-colleagues wasn’t wise. So he steered himself through the vertigo to the sofa. When he sat down, his vision slowly cleared. The Hub was still around him, in all its elaborate details.
He felt for the red ribbon in his pocket. Smooth on the one side, rough on the other, it wrapped around his fingers, a familiar anchor. In Libria, it anchored him to his emotions; here, to the calmness.
This world was too elaborate to be a hallucination and too nonsensical to be true.
Someone put a pleasantly warm cup into his hands. He gripped it tightly. The drink inside was fresh-smelling tea.
‘As much as it pains me to say so,’ Ianto said softly, ‘coffee might not be the best drink right now. Oh, and by the way’, he held up the white-and-purple square, ‘I found this in the pocket of your coat while I was cleaning it. Chocolate goes well with the tea.’
It was a bar of chocolate the girls gave him yesterday on the Plass. Two girls in bright clothes, giggling and kissing and being so much the creatures of this unbelievable world. Preston unwrapped the paper and took a bite of the brown bar. It was sweet and went soft on his tongue. He could never imagine this taste, this texture, this story. It took too much imagination for a mind numb with prozium. It was real. All was real.
Jack, with a cup of coffee, sat down beside him.
‘Can I?..’ he asked and, without waiting for his reply, broke off a bit of chocolate. Chewed it and grinned, leaning back and spreading one hand over the back of the sofa, behind Preston’s neck. His hand rested on Preston’s shoulder just for a moment, warmth of his hot palm soaking into the skin. His gaze was intense, but unreadable; Preston felt as if those eyes were piercing him, like the hand was leaving a mark on him.
Then Jack grinned, light and easy, and rubbed the skin inside his collar with a thumb.
‘Welcome to the team,’ he said.